Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

The gas light in front of the kindergarten appears identical to the ones we had in Philadelphia in the 1940's. Every week or so, a man would come with a ladder that attached to the small cross bar below the glass and wind up the clock works that turned on the light at dusk. So many jobs have disappeared.

This is the third structure built for this congregation, and the second one on this site. The first church was a wooden structure built in 1682 at the southeast corner of Broad and Meeting Streets, on the present site of St. Michael's Church. The second structure was a brick building built here on Church Street, begun in 1711 and finished in 1722-1723. It was a monumental building with three Tuscan temple fronts at the west end (much like the present arrangement). This building burned in 1835 and was replaced by the present church, built 1835-1838, according to the designs of the architect Joseph Hyde. Other architects may have contributed to the design; Edward Brickell White designed the tower. The present structure follows the 18th-century church in many details, including the unusual siting: the building projects out into the path of Church Street, forcing the street to go around it. This is virtually unique in the annals of American city design, and it forms the very pleasing vista we see here.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.